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The Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi) has released a runtime specification for use among Big Data organizations across Apache Hadoop distributions. ODPi hopes this new runtime will enable organizations to use Big Data more efficiently on Hadoop.

Big Data has become a popular topic among Informations Technology (IT) professionals as of late. With the world's data growing at an ever-increasing pace, organizations are struggling to harvest and use data for practical purposes. This has led many organizations, including ODPi, to develop new tools to improve the usability of Big Data. ODPi's runtime environment is designed to help organizations make use of Big Data.

ODPi is a nonprofit organization that was formed last year with the goal of simplifying the otherwise confusing and tedious task of navigating Hadoop and Big Data. This led to the creation of the kernel ODPi core, which follows the mantra of “"test once, use everywhere.” Last September, ODPi became an official project of the Linux Foundation.

The runtime released by ODPi is derived from Apache Hadoop 2.7, featuring HDFS, YARN, and MapReduce components within its core. According to John Metric, senior manager of ODPi, the framework and certification for the runtime environment align with the Apache Software Foundation through its use of Apache Bigtop for packaging and testing.

“We aim to speed Hadoop adoption through ecosystem interoperability rooted in open source so enterprise customers can reap the benefits of increased choice with more modern data applications and solutions,” said Hortonworks co-founder Alan Gates. “We are pleased to see ODPi’s first release become available to the ecosystem and look forward to our continued involvement to accelerate the adoption of modern data applications.”

According to the specs posted on GitHub, ODPi TWG gas three primary objectives:

For consumers – to successfully run any ODPi-compatible software on any ODPi-compatible platform.

For Hadoop platform providers – compliance guidelines that enable ODPi-compatible software to run successfully on their solutions. These guidelines, however, must allow for expeditious software patching to fix vulnerabilities and other problems.

With an official runtime specification for Big Data and Hadoop, you might be wondering what's next for ODPi? Well, it's still too early to make any definitive statements regarding what the organization will do next, but Metric says that it will soon begin to work on assisting enterprises to improve the installation of Hadoop applications, as well as the management of those applications. ODPi is also expected to release the specifications for this project later this year, although an exact date has yet to be announced.

Thanks for reading and feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments below regarding ODPi's runtime specifications.

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